Editorial: A second opinion for nursing home

Published 9:47 pm, Thursday, January 17, 2013

A private deal on Albany County's nursing home includes a private loan.

THE STAKES:

Both clients and taxpayers deserve a sound, secure plan.

The deal on the table to privatize Albany County's nursing home sounds awfully good, even almost too good to be true. And so, as the old consumer warning goes, it's fair to wonder if it is.

We suggest the county follow some classic medical advice when it comes to such a major health care decision: Get a second opinion. Ask a neutral third party, like the Office of the State Comptroller, to review this idea.

That's especially so if the county's taxpayers are going to be loaning money to a private outfit to make this deal work.

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The county has for years been struggling to find a solution to the nursing home, which is running multimillion-dollar losses. In the process, the 250-bed facility has become a political football.

First, then-County Executive Mike Breslin came up with the idea to close the home, make greater use of home care, and arrange for private nursing homes to take the normally hard-to-place clients, such as Alzheimer's patients, who need that level of institutional care. The County Legislature, however, rejected that.

But the legislature's counterproposal to build a new nursing home didn't fly either. Using the county's own numbers, the state nixed that plan as financially infeasible.

Now, County Executive Dan McCoy wants to keep the home open under a contract with Upstate Services Group. The county would lease the home to the firm, an arrangement that Mr. McCoy says would save taxpayers $60 million to $70 million over the next decade.

That's quite a savings for a home losing at least $9 million a year. It's especially impressive considering that the nursing home would still take the hard-to-place clients that many private nursing homes don't want and for whom the county home is said to be pretty much the last resort. Those clients tend to require the most care and attention, making them among the costliest to house.

Yet Mr. McCoy and USG say they can make this work. Part of the success, however, requires some help from the county, which would loan the firm $12 million. The county would borrow the money and then loan it to a new local development corporation, which would in turn loan it to USG. That's on top of a $4 million grant the LDC would give the firm to take hard-to-place patients, and $2 million the county would invest in repairs to the facility.

Some county lawmakers say they're unsure whether public funds can be used this way for a private loan, and suggest Mr. McCoy run this by state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli's office. That's a good idea. But as long as the comptroller is looking, Mr. McCoy should ask for an analysis of the whole deal. Do the finances hold up to independent scrutiny, and is this, in Mr. DiNapoli's view, a sound, smart way to handle an operation that is admittedly getting more and more challenging for taxpayers to support?

As ham-handed as the county has often been in trying to deal with the nursing home, its heart is clearly in the right place. Now the county must use its head. If it can pair good intentions with smart management, it just might do the right thing.